“The conservative takeover” of American politics, the New Yorker’s John Cassidy wrote not long ago, “hinged on ruthless power politics: the G.O.P. exploiting its unearned advantage in the Electoral College, the U.S. Senate, and the Supreme Court itself.” Reaching for an especially damning piece of evidence, Cassidy pointed to the “two senators for every state” rule, a constitutional quirk that has led to a system “where the 1.7 million residents of Idaho receive the same number of representatives as the 39.5 million residents of California.”

Like Cassidy, virtually every critic of the Senate compares the plight of California with that of a ruby red-state like Idaho. If Google is a guide, the state most often cited is Wyoming, with its measly 579,000 residents. Yet almost no one points to the identical outrage in which the 28.3 million residents of Texas receive the same number of senators as the 623,000 residents of Vermont or the 1.06 million residents of Rhode Island.

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The reason, I think, is clear. It is an article of faith that the Senate’s constitutional design punishes the states that are reliably Democratic (California last put a Republican in the Senate in 1988) while unfairly empowering Republican ones (Wyoming last elected a Democrat in 1970).

There’s only one problem with this article of faith: It’s wrong. It’s true that the United States Senate is clearly, deliberately (and unamendably) “undemocratic.” But it is not “un-Democratic.”

In the current Senate, the 10 smallest states have elected 10 Republicans and 10 Democrats (counting the independents Bernie Sanders and Angus King, who caucus with the Democrats). The 10 most populous states send 11 Democrats and nine Republicans to the Senate. In 2009, before two successive midterm disasters cost the Democrats 13 seats, no less than 15 Democrats came from the 10 least populous states. That included both senators from Montana, and one from each of the Dakotas. (Back then, the 10 biggest states split 12-8 in favor of the Democrats).

So Democrats are not victimized by the Senate. But that does not address the more important question, which is whether an intentionally “undemocratic” body has any place in the modern world. I think the answer is yes, for two reasons. First, there’s nothing—and I mean nothing—anyone can do about it. And second, a purely “majoritarian” political process may wind up confronting liberals with the adage, “When you’re up to your neck in alligators, it’s hard to remember that you set out to drain the swamp.”

Let’s take the first one first. The makeup of the House and Senate was the most controversial issue confronting the framers of the Constitution. (You can read the official U.S. Senate history of the debate here.) Unsurprisingly, the biggest states—in the 18th century, Virginia was by far the most populous—wanted both houses apportioned by population. The smallest states were so adamant that they not be steamrolled by their larger neighbors that they insisted that equal representation in the Senate could not be taken away without the consent of the state, even by Constitutional amendment. It’s the last sentence of Article V, if you’re keeping score. That’s right: The counter-majoritarian Senate was so crucial to the framers’ design of the Constitution that it is the only part of the document that is specifically prohibited from being amended.

Maybe there’s a legitimate reason for decrying this state of affairs, particularly because coming population shifts are projected to magnify the imbalance. As longtime congressional observer Norm Ornstein notes: “By 2040 or so, 70 percent of Americans will live in 15 states. Meaning 30 percent will choose 70 senators. And the 30 percent will be older, whiter, more rural, more male than the 70 percent.”

This is, as Ornstein says, “unsettling” from a small “d” democratic view. But unless someone has a nifty idea to persuade every one of the smaller states to give up their two Senate seats, it’s a dilemma without a solution. One academic I heard last year suggested that states could be “incentivized” to abandon their Senate advantage. With what? Matching luggage?

Besides being fruitless, whining about the Senate assumes that older, whiter, rural, male voters are beyond the reach of Democratic candidates. It’s an understandable assumption—Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton among rural voters by a nearly 2-1 margin—but it’s by no means a law of political science. From Jon Tester in Montana to Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota, Democrats have shown an ability to compete and win with these voters, even in red states. Rather than bemoaning the Constitution, Democrats would do well to follow the path trod by their colleagues—a path that does not require embracing the nativist dog whistles of some of their Republican counterparts.

There’s one final point that needs amplifying. With the likelihood of a Supreme Court majority as conservative as any since the mid-1930s, some on the left have taken to suggesting some far-reaching—or overreaching notions. Why not wait until a Democratic president and a Democratic Senate take power, and then, for example, pack the court with a few more liberal justices? Or solve that pesky Senate problem by granting statehood to Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia? Some have even suggested breaking up California into multiple states to add to the left’s senatorial surplus.

Liberals weren’t always so fearful of the ways that the Constitution protects minority interests from majority rule. For decades, liberals celebrated the power of the Constitution and an unelected Supreme Court to expand civil rights and individual liberties in the face of majority opinion. Voters did not enact nationwide school desegregation, the end of prayer in public schools, sweeping abortion rights, expanded protection for criminal suspects or gay marriage. The federal bench was the go-to venue to win these fights.

If the right now has the power to reshape the federal bench and perhaps reverse some of these decisions, that has come at least in part because of a decadelong failure on the part of Democrats to win at the ballot box. And now there is no way to stop the reshaping of the federal bench, no way to alter a hugely regressive tax law, no way to protect the rights of labor, except through the ballot box.

It will be a difficult fight. But if there’s one consolation for embattled Democrats. it’s that their attempt to build a majority will have significant help from many of the smallest states in the union. For all of the party’s burdens, Article V of the Constitution is not one of them.